People love to see a pretty woman get saved by a handsome man

Speaking recently on the pointless Snow White remake in which she’s starring as Queen Grimhilde, Gal Gadot said of the adaptation:

“[Snow White is] not gonna be saved by the prince. She’s not gonna be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.”

I don’t think you need an advanced degree in cognitive film theory to know that this movie is going to be trash, that it’s going to suck, that it’s barely going to measure up as a wan, flaccid imitation of the original, and that it will very likely do poorly at the box office. One of the many reasons that it will fail so grandly is because its filmmakers, like most filmmakers today, don’t really understand any of the things that audiences like to see. And one thing that audiences really like to see is a pretty princess get saved by a prince.

That’s just how it is. People like that. They like to see a young, pretty, appealing woman be rescued by a strong male lead. They like lots of other things, of course, but they really do enjoy that one thing. They don’t really want to see this lady “dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” That’s boring. It sounds sterile and pathetic. Falling in love and being swept away in a whirlwind of romance is great. Dreaming about being a leader is really not great.

Imagine a woman was describing her life story to you. What do you think the more interesting part of that story would be—the time the woman was swept off her feet by some dashing Prince Charming and fell in love with him and created an amazing love-filled life with him, or the time she, um, “became a leader,” or something? Which do you find more captivating?

It’s not hard to figure out why. People like a story in which a man and a woman find each other and join to each other forever. It’s appealing on a timeless level. It just looks right. That kind of union offers the promise of an explicit slate of really happy things: Love, joy, laughter, security, sex, babies, strong communities, strong economies, history, familiarity, endurance, rootedness. People want all of these things, they want these things for themselves and for other people, and they like to see the conditions being met that will lead to these things. When we see the Prince awaken Snow White and carry her off on horseback we can reasonably assume that some good will come of this: They will get married, they will be happy, they will make babies, they will add greatly to the sum total of happiness and pleasantness of the world with their union. We can picture them bringing joy to each other and their family, and we sense instinctively that a good family’s joy is never confined merely to the family itself, that it spills over and enriches the rest of the world by the sheer and unrelenting surfeit of it all. Is it so surprising that this kind of thing is attractive at an elemental level for everyone, aside from apparently Gal Gadot?

There is a boundless gulf between the precepts of modern pop culture and the actual thoughts and feelings of the majority of people. The influencers who drive our cultural machines—our movies, TV, music, books, news coverage—really and sincerely believe that the world enjoys this aseptic, lonely, unhappy vision of human experience, one in which perhaps the most famous romance story of all time is stripped down to an isolated, joyless feminist daydream. The only way that these unfortunate creators know how to interact with the basic facets of humanity is by turning the best human impulses on their head, by taking something as simply great as a man and a woman falling in love and turning it into something about “leadership.” It’s hard to picture a more uninspiring and unappealing declension in filmmaking than this, taking one of the great simple fairy-tale romances of all time and making it into whatever it is they’re doing here. I will take the former and so should you.